Naomi Eilan (University of Warwick)
'On the Role of Attention is Solving the Paradox of Visual Gestalt Switches: an Historical Perspective'

Abstract: Wittgenstein formulates the paradox of gestalt switches as follows: "What is incomprehensible is that nothing, and yet everything has changed, after all. That is the only way to put it". (Wittgenstein, RPP II, §474). The paper sketches a solution to the paradox, which gives attention a critical role. In the course of laying out the structure of the solution I also make three main suggestions. (a) Wittgenstein’s own account of the paradox can only be understood as a detailed response to specific proposals made by the Gestalt psychologist Kohler. (b) The most promising avenue Wittgenstein explored in his many attempts to resolve the paradox gives attention a kind of role that is, in fact, best elaborated and defended by appeal to the kind of information processing theories of attention that were unavailable in his time (c) Despite what are often read as expressions of hostility to psychology, he would have welcomed this kind of appeal to vision science.

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